Building a house in W.A. using fieldstone .Any advice? (esp. actutal experiences). Thanks,Bess.

-- bess (shangallabess@excite.com), January 04, 2002

Answers

what is W.A. ???

-- gene ward (gward34847@aol.com), January 04, 2002.

The state of Western Australia, of course.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), January 04, 2002.

I am in central Texas. I am building a small house out of field stone. I am really enjoying the project.

Buy one or more books on building with stone.

Try to get one or more friends involved.

You don't need to spend much to get started. The real tools are mortar, stones, water, and muscles.

Set up a dry spot to keep your mortar. Start out with just a few bags of mortar. You can buy large quantities of mortar or mortar mixing stuff later. At the beginning you want a small amount to start working/practicing with.

Don't be a perfectionist. If you try to get everything looking just right you will spend a whole lot of time cleaning up the small stuff. It may be best to not take the project too seriously until you have developed on-the-job experience. A good idea is to start out building a stone wall or building a small building for another purpose.

Be on the lookout for large, flat stones. You will need the really big ones for the first couple of courses of stone. You will use tons of stones.

To carry really heavy rocks, you will need a wheelbarrow with inflatable rubber tires. The plastic tire ones will break under the weight of stone.

Allow yourself to be creative. You can make almost anything you want, including making stone shelves, window sills, seats, and arches.

Careful for your back. When it starts to hurt, you will have to take at least a week off – hard to do when you're having so much fun.

Rick#7

-- Rick#7 (rick7@postmark.net), January 04, 2002.

Let the mortar joints set up till fairly firm, then take a small stiff bristled brush, and brush the joints to make them look really fine.

There are three basic ways to do a good rock house, in my experience as a contractor. One way is to pour a good concrete wall, with steel ties extending from it towards the outside. Then, after the forms have been stripped, you can stack the rocks against it.

Second is to build the rock wall first, including steel ties protruding towards the living spacethen put a form on the inside of the rocks, allowing for about six inches of concrete between the form and the rocks.

Third, and this is a method I developed recently, after retiring. It's great for people doing a job for themselves, who aren't trying to make a bunch of money per hour. Pour the form,but put 2x4 studs every two feet, sunk into the inside edge of the footing. These studs should be long enough to extend to the top of the wall, and can be reused later inside the house, if you cut them off, or break them off, at the top of the footing. (place these studs in such a place that you'll have room for about seven inches of concrete between them and the rocks; . Be sure to place rebar, bent into an el or 'j" so it goes from under one of the rebars in the footings up about four feet or so, into the air. Center the steel inside the concrete wall space.

Next, stack about a foot of rock wall, near the outside edge of the footing.

Then, loosely lay a 1x12, or 2-1x6's against the studs, on the side the concreted wall will be poured.

Next, pour the wall a foot deep. When the concrete is slightly firm, pull the one by's out.

Repeat, one foot at a time, until you reach the top of the wall.

The beauty of this third method is you don't have to build forms strong enough to deal with the extreme pressures which tall concrete walls usually produce, since the liquid concrete is never over about a foot deep.

In all three cases, be sure to build a very stout footing, and put plenty of rebar in the footing and in the wall.

The only way you'll have any noticable insulation with any masonry wall, incidentally, is to place insulation; the masonry itself has an R value of near zero.

I like to put a 2x4 stud wall inside the concrete wall, using R 21 insulation (six inches of high density fiberglass) and leave enough space between the studs and the concrete so there's an inch of air space between the fiberglass and the concrete. This will help prevent the fiberglass getting moisture from the concrete, which is hygroscopic.

Hope this helps, although I find that a lot of folks decide not to build with rock, once they find out what all is required!

-- joj (jump@off.c), January 04, 2002.

BESS....THE R-VALUE OF ROCK AND CONCRETE IS ABOUT R=0.1 PER INCH. OLD CASTLES WERE DAMP BECAUSE ROCKS SWEAT.[DEW POINT]I`D CONSIDER BUILDING A FRAME HOUSE AND PUT THE ROCK AROUND THE HOUSE FRAME.THEN INSULATE THE FRAME WALLS BUT HAVE A VAPOUR BARRIER BETWEEN. A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK CORDWOOD LOOKS LIKE A STONE HOUSE.HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED INTO CORDWOOD,STACKWALL.GREAT R-VALUES AND THERMAL MASS.16" TO 24" WALLS THE NORM.YOU COULD USE THE FIELDSTONE AS A FOUNDATION PERHAPS.

CORDWOODGUY

-- CORDWOODGUY (cordwoodguy@n2teaching.com), January 04, 2002.

Bess, I've done some building with stone, but not full houses. I once built a foundation for a stackwall house out of feildstone, and shot rock (blasted quarry rock) It took two and a half months; and it was a long two and half months. I hope the rocks you are planning to use are not as heavy as ours were. What we needed was a wall that would be wide enough to support the 24'' stackwall, plus a two inch lip to sit the floor joists on. It also had be tall enough to sit on something solid, and have the cordwood be out of the floodplain water level. What we ended up with was a hole dug four feet down, with a floating ring wall of concrete lying on river stones. Re-bar steel was left sticking out of the concrete every five feet. We placed each rock individually twice. Once to see if it overlaped the lower crack, and once to gently set it on the thick concrete. We placed two rows of large stone, one on the outside of the wall, and one on the inside, and infilled with a slurry of wetter concrete mix, and smaller rocks. The wall was 7 feet off the river stone when complete. We then made a sill plate to do the flooring, and butted the cordwood against the joists. Fun parts were doing arched doorways at eiiher end of the basement, and finding neat steel bits at the junkyard to insert in the walls. As an example, we used large break drums from heavy machines for porthole like windows, which although heavy were nothing compared to the stone. Some of our stones took 5 men to lift. I don't recommend using stone of this mass; it was not my project, but one of a friend of mine. We thought later that it might have been a good idea to enlist some body builders from the local gym, to cancel thier gym memberships and lift stone for free. You might want to try looking into shaping the wall on the ground and tilting it up with a machine. There should be some info around on this method You can also build forms and fill them with stone, and concrete. Usually your forms are fairly short so that you can work easily within them, without straining your back. I don't know what alternatives you have for building with thier, or what your finances are. I'm personally planning to make a house encorporating stone and cordwood. The plan is a circle, with the southern quarter being five feet of stone, and the lower two feet everywhere else of stone, then stackwall. Radii will extend outward from the end of the higher stone wall, so that the south of the house will have an addition to the circle. This semi-cirlce will be a greenhouse/ solarium. The stone will absorb lover winter sunlight heat. It will also have a fireplace in it that will extend in stonework, up two stories in the center of the wall. the final drawings are not done. I'm gathering matterials for a few years before I begin. Good luck on your project.

-- roberto pokachinni (pokachinni@yahoo.com), January 04, 2002.

One of my favorite glossy magazine is Fine Homebuilding [Taunton Press]. I haven't subscribed to it for years. Alas.

But, I clearly remember an article about a decade ago about cottage stone houses. They profiled a beautiful homeowner made house. The walls were made using standard concrete forms. The pour was .. a bit of concrete .. a few fieldstones .. a bit of.. etc.. I'm sure there were ties here and there. I don't really remember.

But, the outcome was just beautiful. I wish I could scan the photo for you, but I gave away all my FHB copies a few years ago.

It really seemed like an easy, yet attractive, homebuilder alternative.

-- pc (pc@somewhere.com), January 04, 2002.

Bess,

What PC is talking about is a method called "slip forming". That is how I did my basement. I followed the technique that Scott and Helen Nearing used to build their stone houses in Vermont. My wife a I did all the work ourselves and it took us about three weeks.

If you are interested in this method, it is one that I recommend as it does not require a lot of skill to do. It was my wife's and mine forist stone project and though the work was hard, we were very satisfied with the results.

Slip forming is basically, building a form our of wood, lining the front and back with stones and filling in the middle with concrete. We did it 16 inches at a time using twelve foot long forms. The reason we did it this way was because it was just the two of us doing all the work. Bigger forms would probably have made it go a little quicker. After we did the first 16 inches of wall we would move the form up to the next 16 inches. Bracing the forms so that the concrete would not spill out. We allow 24 hours for each section to cure before putting the next on ontop. OUr final wall was 6 1/2 foot high.

Sincerely,

Ernest

-- http://communities.msn.com/livingoffthelandintheozarks (espresso42@hotmail.com), January 05, 2002.

Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. These folks were homesteading and had "up to date (with 2002!)" ideals of farming, stc in the late 20s. Several chapters deal with stone building. I would recommend trying plywood instead of planking for the forms. They also wrote several other books: Continueing the good life, Econimics of the power age (44) Where is civilization going? (26) and another one I cant find anywhere the real title, but some thingg like "how to raise a stone house" which went into further detail. You might alos try John Burroughs SIGNS ABD SEASONS, dont know what is all in it, but burroughs stone work is natioally renouned, and the dook living the good life makes numerous refferences to it in the stone building chapters. My thought on insulation: foam insulation undersiding type) culd be fitted INSIDE the wall as it was going up to provide added insulation.

-- Kevin in NC (Vantravlrs@aol.com), January 06, 2002.

Kevin, I've often considered using foam insualtion inside the wall. I just couldn't figure out how to do this without either making the wall much thicker, or making the wall much weaker.

What thickness of wall do you have in mind?

-- joj (jump@off.c), January 07, 2002.

Thanks to everyone who answered.As far as what W.A. stands for it's simple and not half as exotic.Washington state ,U.S.A. I wonder if anyone who built with fieldstone remembers anything about more practical matters, such as:the ammount of materials used ,experiences with different foundation types,amount of time required and so on. I've gone through most of the books on the matter but exact numbers and personal experiences from the people who actually have done it with their own hands are a rare commodity. As far as building with cordwood ,I've thought about it but in this rainy climate it's not as usefull exept as insulation(probably gonna use it in that manner on the second floor,inside the fieldstone wall). I don't want to use any non natural materials ,so usual insulation is not an option(plus it's not all that effective anyway) Thanks,Bess.

-- bess (shangallabess@excite.com), January 20, 2002.

Check out www.hollowtop.com Tom Elpel has a great book called "Living Homes..." all about alt. construction techniques, including extensive sections on slip forming, his own brand of tilt- up stone walls and a type of super-simple log construction I have never seen before. And Straw bale. Spends a great deal of time talking about home systems, and how to hide insulation inside those stone walls. I am not tied in any way to his org, just a satisfied reader.

Can't recomend this book highily enough. His others are hum dingers too: Botny in a Day (Wild plant food), Participating in Nature (Primitive skills), Direct Pointing to real wealth ("Field guide to money").

-- James in ID (jlfinkbeiner@Yahoo.com), February 08, 2002.

Hello Bess, I don't have an answer, but was wondering where you live in Wa. I also live in Wa. and am wanting to build either a stone cottage or a cement block house. I was one that was very extravangent on Hgtv made of cement blocks and they had two wall with foam insulating inside the two walls. I really would like to have a stone house. I live in Yelm and we have an undending supply of stones. Pat

-- Pat Gaytan (pat@lugosoft.com), February 25, 2002.

I am requesting all the advice anyone wants to give ! I am in a position where I can obtain tons and tons of rounded river stones, I am therefore considering building a "LARGE" house out of these stones, Insulation in not an issue as I live in Malaysia where It is always warm, and I am considering a wall thickness of about 20 inches (comments most welcome), the lanned house will be 2 story in some areas and sitting on a 1 Acre patch of land on top of a hill.

All advice or comments most welcome (any pictures for guidance would be greatfully received).

Looking forward to hearing of other peoples experiences.

Phil

-- Phil Hart (inspect@tm.net.my), March 09, 2002.